


Relative Motion

by de_Clare



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: ADHD, Astronomy, Character Study, M/M, Psychopharmaca, The Gifted Child
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-27 02:26:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21845551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/de_Clare/pseuds/de_Clare
Summary: John suspects that adult ADHD would be a more appropriate diagnosis for Sherlock.
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Comments: 1
Kudos: 32





	Relative Motion

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. I am not a clinical psychologist, so information comes from personal experience and research. I also don’t think there’s an ‘ontology’ (as in self-contained reality) to mental health and learning difference diagnoses. They can be helpful lenses onto approaching one’s own mind. But they also come freighted with stigma or assumptions that one simply “has” a diagnosis and the only ways of approaching that are laid-out in the latest edition of the DSM. We all have agency in naming and living with our own minds.
> 
> 2\. In my ideal and lived realities, the distinction between friends and lovers isn’t so sharp. However, because the show invests itself in those lines, I’m going to assert that Sherlock and John do see themselves as lovers in this fic. This means that the ambient exchanges of intimacy, sex, communication, processing, etc. make it possible to co-exist with one another without frustrating and resentful co-dependency developing. At least that’s my headcanon.

John is conscious, overly-conscious of his role as caregiver.

He’s even noticed that Sherlock’s habitual self-diagnosis of high-functioning sociopath is in fact a symptom of something far more banal...low-functioning (perhaps should be called hyper-functioning) ADHD.

Of course, psychiatry was a bit on the woolly side of medicine when he was in medical school, and he blagged his way out of clinical rotations. A stupid decision, really. The majority of wounds he encountered in his surgery and trauma rotations were psychological. So he did what he was trained to do: minimized for the mild cases, referral to the chaplain for the severe.

But now, the merry roundabout of psychopharmacological acronyms (SSRI, MAOI, SNDRI—Sundry?), off-label flirtations with cannabinoids and a steady stream of builder’s tea and biscuits have familiarised him with the complex contortions of neurochemistry.

He’s no Sherlock—who deals first in deductive reasoning, then the more subjective induction all to compensate for a serious deficiency in the most common form of reasoning—intuition.

John once read a study, pre-digested for the masses by The Guardian, which said children praised for their intelligence tended to avoid challenging tasks to preserve the image of success. Of course, Sherlock knew the Earth went around the sun, but beyond that very little. It’s so simple to imagine, the haughty public school boy who’d compensated for bullying with private assurances of his superiority. Then science lectures where his observations—the sun clearly traversing the sky—could not be taken for granted. His senses had deceived him—he failed to notice the solar parallax, the precessions of the earth which tipped the angle of the sun. There was ample evidence: seasons, aberrations of starlight, but he had been no better than the abusive brutes around him who couldn't deduce botulism from a distorted tin.

The average child could compensate for the loss by relying on their other talents. But not the gifted child.

Sherlock employed his most ready face-saving defence: deliberately shutting out all to do with stars, planets, maths and any scientific theory whose proofs couldn’t be replicated in a well-stocked kitchen.

But of course the story doesn’t end there. The gifted child, fraught with his contradictions, harnesses the staggering power of his hyperbolic attention to analyze others, the outside, them, objects. He knew a compulsive liar from the inseam of her trousers, but the step back, the digression into shape of that unwieldy intellectual apparatus—impossible. It’s why he’d never know he carried the equivalent of a bazooka on his shoulders, repeating the daily neurosis of proving his intelligence, while those around him were scraping their skull fragments from the floor.

It takes a genius to keep one’s shortcomings out of sight. Like when Ptolemy observed the retrograde movements of planets in the sky and concluded, well, their orbits must lurch back in epicycles. But as epicycles piled onto epicycles, the genius of intuition, the sudden change in root design, stepped in. The planets weren’t going backward—the earth had simply whizzed past its slower neighbors. Relative motion.

But the gifted child is threatened by the relative, the frustratingly backward turns of his friends.

And so the subtle manifestations of ADHD in a gifted adult become a labyrinth of stimulants, gaslighting, denial, deprioritized self-care rituals…  
Until one day another body traverses the sky and the clever ADHD child imagines, in the grips of insomnia, how that body moves in the dark of its own day.


End file.
